1. Field of the General Inventive Concept
The present general inventive concept relates to a printing control method and a printing control terminal device. More particularly, the present general inventive concept relates to a printing control method by which an image forming apparatus can enhance the speed to recognize an XML paper specification (XPS) file, and a printing control terminal device implementing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, image forming apparatuses are devices that print printing data generated by a terminal device, such as computer, on a recording medium. Example of image forming apparatuses include copiers, printers, facsimile machines, and multifunction peripherals (MFP) implementing the functions of the aforementioned machines using a single device.
Recent image forming apparatuses support a function for printing an XPS file using an XPS emulator as well as data written in a Page Description Language (PDL) such as Post Script (PS) and Printer Command Language (PCL), which are provided conventionally.
An XPS file is a fixed-layout electronic file designed to preserve document fidelity and be capable of sharing the file, which is a zip archive in which all the resources needed for a corresponding document or job are systemized in a directory structure and the relationship between the directories is made up using an Extensible Markup Language (XML). Such an XPS file has a logical structure of a tree type having a plurality of layers as illustrated in FIG. 9.
Referring to FIG. 9, the XPS file consists of levels such as a job level, a document level, and a page level. Each document level and each page level may include a plurality of documents and a plurality of pages, respectively. Different printing options can be set for each document and each page.
A process of an image forming apparatus recognizing an XPS file is different from a conventional process of an image forming apparatus recognizing a PS file and a PCL file. More specifically, an image forming apparatus recognizes a PS file and a PCL files by analyzing a Printer Job Language (PJL) command received from a terminal device. However, an image forming apparatus recognizes an XPS file by detecting an XPS attribute file contained in the XPS file.
However, since the position of an XPS attribute file is not fixed at a specific position of an XPS file, it is not easy for an image forming apparatus to determine whether received data is an XPS file. In particular, if an image forming apparatus determines a type of received printing data using only a predetermined portion of the received printing data, the image forming apparatus may not recognize the received printing data, thereby causing an error.